Step by Step Progress

Three helpers came yesterday and worked on the back stairs for a few hours. It is looking really great, imho. I don’t know that the steps actually need a second coat at this point. I will see how I feel later in the week. I guess I should start cataloguing books. I hope I can get back into the swing of it. I wonder where my book imprinter is…

Looking great imho

Today has been a surprisingly good day for accomplishments. Here it is just noon and I feel like I have gotten a few things checked off of my to do list. Woo hoo!

Some of the morning was spent finishing the latest Rivers of London book: Whispers Underground. Fun stuff. I have put the next two books in the series on hold and they ought to be popping into my local library sometime next week. In the meantime, I guess I will get back to all the books that have piled up in my TBR (to be read) pile. And there was one book that I started that I believe is still in the car’s trunk.

More parts of the morning were spent working on my Filemaker database. I want to use it instead of a word processing document or spreadsheet to collect my campaign and presidential governing thoughts. I think it is in good shape. It took me a while to figure out how to get data to import correctly, but I got that worked out. And with some help from YouTube, I managed to get a drop down menu created pretty easily. So, now I am just waiting for my niece to do her magic and organize my Augustus for President Thoughts document. I’ll write her on Monday and ask her the status. Maybe she will be done. That would be cool. If not, I might just say screw it and take it back because I could just import it all into my database. All that her work will accomplish (which would be great) would be to add the type of thought to more of the items. Less work for me which is always a good thing.

Hopefully my copies of Bar Dreams will be arriving soon. It will be nice to have those back in stock.

It is later. I didn’t do a lot more, though I did a little bit towards the campaign.

Tonight’s dinner will be breakfast! I will cook a one egg cheese omelet, a hash brown, a waffle and some maple sausages. So excited! I hope my cream cheese is still good…

Augustus for President: Well, the database work was a good thing to have accomplished today. I will enter any new thoughts there. I also saw that there is a way to check one’s business account on the IRS website, so I will try that this afternoon. That should tell me if they got my letter and changed the name of the company in their files. If they haven’t, I can try calling them on Monday. I don’t want to start having get togethers with people until I can collect donations. Hahaha.

Well, that’s frustrating. I tried to get into the IRS with my EIN and I did not succeed. So I guess I will try calling them on Monday. I don’t think anyone will answer because of the shut down. But hope springs eternal. And I am now concerned about why I had to spend money to get an EIN when the IRS website says that getting an EIN is free. I am so confused about that. Oh well, it is money over the dam or something like that.

No Apples for Me!

Today I did not pick apples. My friend SM asked me to help her get a few more apples off of her apple trees, the apples that were too high up for her. I was going to go help, but ended up not making it out of the house.

First, there was the whole, it’s Saturday, let’s get up late thing. That turned into – let’s read out fun book. And that led to lunch. Yay lunch!

I had leftovers from last night for lunch. I don’t know what sauce CL Luffy use in Gyu Don, maybe just teriyaki or a variant, but I find it delicious. I still have enough of that dish to have if for lunch tomorrow as well.

After lunch, three of the four helpers showed up. The guy who had been so enthusiastic was a no show. I will give him another opportunity next week but this is not looking good.

The women did a great job on the back stairs. They are almost done. They want to do another coat on the steps and maybe another coat on the railings. All of this means that I will have to get off my mental butt and start cataloguing the books that will live again on those shelves. And because I am slightly insane (in a good way), all I can think about is getting a few of the containers of crap from the tool bench and environs and bring them up into the living room and start putting like with like. I am so weird.

The ladies left at around 4:30. I had lost and then found my new fancy bookmark. And that meant (while it was lost) that I ought to keep reading.

Tonight I think I will do my accounts. After I do my evening Duolingo.

I am making pizza and wings again tonight. The pizza didn’t get a crispy crust last time. Maybe what I will try is after a good bit of cooking time, taking the pizza out and move it around the pizza stone a bit and see if that helps the crust to crisp up. The debate, as usual, is whether or not a salad will be part of the dinner equation.

Augustus for President: Well, that’s incredibly frustrating. It seems that some people’s answers/responses aren’t being captured by google Forms for whatever reason. PvK said she had answered some of the surveys. And one of my helpers said she had as well. But neither person’s answers showed up. So I wonder how many people have filled out the surveys and not had their responses show up. It is very strange. Grrr. So, I will either have to go premium with some survey app, which is expensive in every app I have seen. Or use Survey Planet maybe which looks mostly free. I don’t know. It is irking me though. In other words, don’t try to fill out surveys until I get this figured out.

My friend EL helped me get Powerpoint and Filemaker. I am excited to work/play with both!

Well, I was having problems with my html table that I am working on for the campaign website. And my friendly tech support guy there fixed the issue quickly. Some script problem on his end. Woo hoo!

Am I a Nerd or a Geek or something else?

Despite being Christmas themed…

I think I am both a nerd and a geek. Not a geek like a carnival geek. But a geek in terms of interested in things. Sometimes too interested. And though I didn’t study all that much while I was in school, I did and do enjoy learning of just about any kind. I still contend that you start dying more quickly when you stop learning.

Today was a no dash day. I just saw a message from Door Dash offering $3 a ride extra. But I won’t do it. It is night time. And I really don’t like dashing at night. I like no Dash Days. But not so much that I would do Airbnb again.

Instead of dashing, I ran some errands. I went to Walmart (ick) and bought curtain rods, bandaids and some hand soap. When I went to put the hand soap in my bathroom (the helpers might need to use the toilet at some point) I discovered that I had hand soap in the cabinet already. Sigh. Still, more is better. Go ‘Merica!

Next stop Harbor Freight. I spent way too much money on painting supplies. More blue tape, a few rollers and another set of brushes. Can one ever have too many paint brushes? I think not! I wanted to get compressed air there too, but they were out. So I went next door to Staples and bought some there. I have decided that the problem with the phone not charging sometimes was that there was glunk in there. So I will use the air to blast the port clean from time to time.

Last stop for the morning was a visit to JC and EC. CC was curious if there were any unpaid bills lying around so that was part of the reason for my visit. I also wanted to return JC his handicap placard. I have been scrupulous and not used it except when he was in the car. And of course, more phone education was accomplished. There were only 40 solicitations for funds this time. That’s an improvement over the 90+ that there were the last time. Also, someone had put the phone on silent mode, which meant that the phone never rang. it just vibrated once when someone called. No bueno. All in all it was a good visit.

Lunch – I finally finished up my steak and fries from the sandwich place on Seneca Street. Tasty to the last bite. Yay garlic!

To be honest, the rest of the day was spent being a vegetable. I read a little. I started a load of laundry. I watched some stuff online. And thought a lot of deep thoughts (i.e. napped).

Suddenly, it was dinner with SM time! I am amazed she puts up with me as much as she does. We went to dinner at CL Luffy. They have redecorated and I didn’t really like it. It is glaringly white in there now. Way too bright for a restaurant for my taste. Oh well. They were out of what SM wanted so we finally found a good set of things for her to eat. I had a gyo don bowl which was good. I still have half of it in the fridge.

Now I am home and ready for another exciting evening at the Chalet!

Augustus for President: So if history repeats itself, what political or leader am I to be/emulate? Lincoln would be ok, except there isn’t really anything like slavery (overt – prisons are another story) to motivate the entire country simultaneously. And getting assassinated wouldn’t be the best thing…

I think I will go at least two sizes bigger the next time I order stickers. Hopefully I will give a lot of them away on my trip. And from now until then too. I need to start seriously thinking about setting up some meet and greets here in Geneva.

I used to Work There!

About time! I wonder why it took so long…

Wow, what a weird start to the day. I rolled over, pulled up my iPhone, which I had left charging overnight and started to do some Duolingo. Yay. Except that a few minutes later the phone blacked out. The battery was basically dead. No charging had happened. Grr. I futzed around with the charging cable and – no love. No charging was happening. I went through all of my charging cables and nothing. I had contingencies in mind – like driving to Rochester to buy a new phone. Or getting it fixed. I had one more thing to try, plugging the phone into the car charging cable. Which I did. And that worked. So, I ended up charging the phone in the car. At least I got to read. But I started my first dash almost an hour late. (Later, I decided to try to clean out the charge port – maybe that helped as well…)

Yes, I did a first dash. And it was ok. Of course, the dash I was offered just before I wanted to quit was a long trip for not enough money. Sigh. Oh, and I took Dunkin to Canandaigua. Luckily, I got to chat with the person I delivered to, who told me that a water main had broken and lots of restaurants along the main drag there were closed! Poor them! And poor dashers over there.

At lunch time, I was going to wash more dishes, but having burnt my thumb a teeny bit and put a bandaid on it, I didn’t then want to put my hands in soapy water. Yes, I wash all my dishes by hand. I’ll do the dishes tomorrow I guess. Not that there are a lot of them…

My second dash was bad. First offer, too far, not enough money. A few decent rides, but most were also too far for too little money. Though someone did add $5 to one of the orders, which is a good thing. Because I wanted to do trivia tonight, and in honor of that wanted to take a shower and eat something before heading there, I decided to stop early. Yes, again this week I did not make a buttload of money. But that’s ok. I wonder what the ratio of good overall dash sessions to bad overall dash sessions is. I’ll do the math at some point. I am guessing it is at least 1:4.

Anyway, I am going to take a shower, eat something and try to get to Twisted by 7. That should be doable.

Augustus For President: I know that third part candidates don’t do well in Presidential Elections. Or at least they have never done well in presidential elections. Though there was a time when the “republicans” replaced the “whigs” back in 1860-1896. Anyway, how dare I think that I could do better than Jill Stein, who has run three times? She didn’t even break a million votes nationwide. Am I sincerely crazy? Probably. I just think I have more going for me than Dr. Stein. Hubris, don’t you know. Honestly, I think it is a function of time and message. She didn’t give herself enough time. And her message, though good, didn’t resonate with the masses. In my humblest of opinions.

The process to become president really puts parties and people who aren’t the Democrats and the Republicans at a severe disadvantage. I mean, really terrible. We have to split our resources, sort of, between gathering support and gathering signatures and money to get on all the ballots.

And can someone explain to me why people in US territories cannot vote in presidential elections.

I need a good project manager. Any volunteers? You will eventually, hopefully, be paid…

Absurd Number of Visitors

I have no idea why so many people visited this blog site the other day. About 400 views on a large number of pages. I wonder if it was some sort of bot doing a download of my blogs. It sure has messed up my stats, though. Luckily, the large spike will move off in a week and I can get back to the two or three views on each blog post that I have come to expect. Woo hoo

Scary!

Today was sort of a two dash day.

First dash was not great. Not many offers, a bit of distance (one offer was crazy long) but a decent amount of money. It could have been better. But I quit when I quit with no regrets. I am really happy that I don’t rely solely on Door Dash and Dashing for income! Phew even.

At home, I got a little bit accomplished. I did some of the reminders, like measuring how tall the doorway on the side porch is. Hmm. Maybe I will split that into two pieces, so that I can do the door and the transom sort of thing separately. I will look into curtains when I got to Walmart (ick) on Friday to buy curtain rods. I guess I could buy two curtain rods. I mean, why not?

I also cleaned up the sink in the kitchen. Tomorrow, glassware. I don’t think that there will be a huge influx of dishes tonight. I took out the wet trash from the kitchen, only to discover that my boarder had tossed a lot of redeemables into the trash. At least 6 of them. That’s $.30. Which, to me in my ingrained depression era (from my mom) brain, is a lot of money to just throw away.

Second dash, well, it started to rain. The dash got off to a slow start with me sitting around and reading for at least twenty minutes. I eventually got a few rides, but then it started to rain. And I just don’t like dashing in the rain. Especially in the dark. So I stopped at around 5 pm and came back home.

Here, I read. I am really enjoying the Rivers of Soho series by Ben Aaronovitch. I read somewhere that the BBC might be making a television series from the books. After the terrible job that Amazon did with the Wheel of Time series with its incredibly loose and horrible adaptation, I am not holding out much hope that this one will be any good. Yes, one bad apple DOES spoil the whole bunch…

I have done my Duolingo and the blog is mostly done. Time to eat dinner. I am having leftover lasagna, with a piece of garlic cheese toast and a salad. So excited…ok, not really. It is more like fodder tonight. Oh, and pool was canceled because the host is sick. Poo.

Augustus for President: I tried the SQL script that I found on YouTube that was supposed to add dates created to my table. It did the ones that existed. But new ones aren’t automatically populated. And when I went to run the script again, it threw out an error. Poo.

I have another survey idea I would like to put up on the campaign website. It is really sad that people aren’t doing the surveys. Oh well. I will survive.

And speaking of surveys, the web company that I have the campaign website with doesn’t have an in app table building function. Or the ability to create columns. Eric to the rescue though and gave me two work arounds. I might get to them tonight. Or over the weekend.

And it is sad that an acquaintance of mine didn’t win their city council race. Grrr. Loser voters.

Red Bush

Pretty Bush!

I’ve been playing with computers since I was 11 or so. Maybe a little bit before that. In that time, I have resisted, so far successfully, learning how to communicate with databases using SQL. The database I am using now is heavily SQL focused, so that might need to change. Sad that that is the case because my database is so easy and small. I guess we shall see. I am trying to import a file and it is proving to be more difficult than I thought it would be. I seem to remember simple interfaces with Filemaker and database heavy applications like MailChimp. I’ll keep plodding along.

My first of two dashes was pleasant enough. Not particularly lucrative, but not terrible. And not a lot of long drives. All in all, decent. We like that.

At lunch time, I really didn’t do a lot. Partly because I was cold. Maybe I will bring the space heater up to my room and use it while I lunch. I don’t want to heat the whole house since it is only me here at lunch time.

My second dashing shift was decent as well. A couple of long rides but I did well enough to stop before my three hour, self imposed, schedule was finished. Part of the reason was that I wanted to avoid the possible last dash for not quite enough money that would add half an hour to my dash.

I spoke with a few dashers today. One was kinda scary. The other, I wish I could remember his name – I really need to work on my name skills – and I had a nice chat. I also got an order to pick up from Arby’s. It feels like I haven’t picked up there in weeks and weeks. Some of my favorite people were there. That always makes me happy.

Duolingo is done. And I am about done with the blog. More tacos for dinner tonight. I got something out of the deep freeze that I thought was a bag of flour tacos. It wasn’t. It was a bag of moo shu wrappers. I don’t think they would survive deep frying – especially with stuff in them. I will use them someday, but not tonight. Maybe I will order something Moo shu from one of the Chinese restaurants at some point in the not too distant future. I used to eat them with duck, but the last time I got the duck from the place up in Rochester, it didn’t taste the same to me. So I haven’t been back on a while…

Augustus for President: Had a nice chat with someone at Man Yuan. For some reason she was reluctant to let me use my NFC card, but that is to be expected sometimes.

At Arby’s I gave a couple of people stickers and they put them on immediately. So I gave them more so that they could look up the website. Hahahaha. I wonder if anyone has gone to the website from the stickers. So far, I don’t think so. And none of my helpers have gone there yet. We will see if they get their acts together before work time on Saturday. If they haven’t, I guess I will ask them to do it politely before they start working.

Still working on the database. And no word from K about when I might expect an organized document from her. Hopefully this year…

Christmas in November?

I seem to have lost another file. Maybe even more than one. It was my list of who I knew in which states. I can’t remember what it was called and I can’t find anything that even looks like it. Which sucks.

Ok, turns out it was part of another file and not a standalone file. At least I found it!

Wasn’t Halloween like yesterday?

This was dismaying to see. Though I do like the smell of pine that was wafting off of it. Halloween is barely passed, Thanksgiving hasn’t even happened and Wegman’s is already starting with the Christmas stuff. Sigh.

Today was a two dash dash. The first was pretty standard. The second had two really long drives to Canandaigua! That hasn’t happened to me before. Two long drives, sure. But not two to Canandaigua. I actually prefer the drive to Canandaigua more than the drive to Lyons or Clyde. Those two are both out in the middle of nowhere. Canandaigua just feels more urban. One ride was well compensated, the other not as well. Overall, a decent day. Woo hoo!

At lunch time I didn’t do all that much. I spent a little time looking at how to create a drop down menu for the database. And started to look to see if there was an easy way to have a “created” date added to a record. I would have thought that was an easy peasy thing to do, but so far, the answer is eluding me. Oh well.

I got home about an hour later than I had really wanted to. Not that I had any big plans. I just like more relaxing time than busy time. And the algorithm did it to me again – gave me a long drive as I was wanting to stop for the evening. Grr and sigh.

If I had gone further into Canandaigua I would have gone to the Wegman’s there. But it was out of my way since I was just on the outskirts of the city. So I stopped at the Geneva Wegman’s. There, I had a long talk with a grade school classmate who I don’t see all that often. Somehow he had gotten the impression that my American Dream book had gotten written. It hadn’t. But he said he is still willing to buy a copy of Bar Dreams. Yay! He ran for and won a city council position for four years. So I hope to pick his brain a little bit at some point. He also said that he and his wife bought a house in Maine. Turns out that he is almost neighbors with my sister! Small planet!

Augustus for President: Besides the work on the database, which I hope will allow me to import my latest thoughts eventually, I also gave out more stickers today. Quite a few I think. And I had that nice talk with TB. We shall see what comes of any of that. If anything.

I brought up the idea that the President shouldn’t be of either party. TB seemed to buy that. I wonder if that idea will resonate with other people. Here’s hoping!

Weren’t They Adorable?

Today has been a quiet one. I got up in a leisurely fashion, not really rolling out of bed until nearly lunch time. I spent the between waking up and eating doing various tasks. Duolingo – where it looks like I might just eke out a top 10 in the Diamond League Tournament. Please, no flowers, just money. I also listened to more of the Wheel of Time book. And I did some work on the database.

First I watched the rest of the basics video. Then I found a video that focused on forms. That helped a good bit. I still have questions, but I think I can muddle through from where I was left this morning. This is exactly what I was looking for. A straight up, single table database that doesn’t cost anything. Woo hoo! I still have a ways to go to make it what I want, but at least I can see that it can be done. That’s a great step, imho.

While the helpers were here, all of whom did great yesterday from what I can tell, the person working in the basement and I came across a pile of pictures. One of the pictures was in a broken frame (both frame and glass) and this is the picture it held. My mom was the same age as Shirley Temple. And people told her she was more talented. Mom and her brother were actually on radio a bit when they were really young. No wonder mom wasn’t too upset when I decided to major in theatre!

My mom and uncle

After lunch, I did a load of laundry – all folded and mostly put away. And I read more of and then finished the book I was reading: The Subtle Are of Not Giving a Fuck. It was not a great book. At least for me. Most of the content was stuff that I knew and was, hopefully, mostly putting into practice already. Still, it never hurts to have those thoughts reiterated. If you like self help books, this one is ok. Not greatly written, but with some good thoughts.

Soon, I will be heading to dinner with SM. We are also planning on going to The Cracker Factory after dinner so she can say hi to the owner who she thinks highly of.

That was fun. We had a decent time at the sandwich place. Not the best food, but good sized portions and tasty enough. Then off to Cracker Factory. I played a little pool. SM chatted and hung out with people. I think fun was had by all involved!

Augustus for President: One reason I am creating the database, is so that when I get the document back from K, I can put those thoughts into the database. That way I can more easily see if I have duplicate thoughts. And I can, hopefully, assign tasks to people who say they want to help. Speaking of which, I still haven’t heard back from either of the two people who left their info on the campaign website. I won’t bother them again until I am up to ten people or so.

Gave out at least 4 more stickers. Every sticker out means a teeny connection made. Who else gives out little stickers like this?

That Wasn’t Particularly Fun

I am slightly superstitious. I would hope most people are. Not sure why, but I am and I do. Anyway, I didn’t say Rabbit Rabbit last month. Which meant, according to the lore, I think, that I was to have a bad month. Well, it didn’t seem particularly bad to me. Until last night. At around 11 I believe, I decided that I needed to order more copies of Bar Dreams, finally. I will be able to sell copies while I am on the road I think. Every little shekel will help. Anyway, that would have entailed me going to a website that I rarely go to.

So I popped open my…wait, where did it go? Maybe I closed it at some point…but no, it isn’t showing up on the recently closed menu or in the window menu. Hmm. I wonder what happened. Oh, maybe I deleted it by accident from my iCloud account as I was sharing that file between my phone and my computer. Sadly, it was over 30 days ago that I deleted it so, poof. It was gone. From everywhere. And unretrievable. Consequences of actions, don’t you know.

Time to make a solution. Start a new file. Think where an older copy of the file might be – on my old laptop. Which I need to use a monitor with since it’s screen is kaputt. Hmm, I have this vague memory of erasing the files from the iCloud drive – iCloud had complained that my drive was almost full. At the time, I thought I would just delete a lot of crap up there that I haven’t and won’t touch for the rest of my life I don’t think. But…just in case, the pack rat in me unlimbered a large storage device and copied everything I was deleting onto that device. Just in case.

And I had a case. As I was not sleeping last night, I had this memory, asked siri to remind me of it in the morning – not that I was likely to forget – to see if the data was on one of my drives. And I promptly fell asleep.

Now it is morning, I have gotten out of bed and retrieved the drives. I need to look and see if the file (and a second fairly important and tediously created file) were indeed on that drive. And, lo and behold, verily I say unto you – backing up is important. And saving everything isn’t necessarily a bad trait. Both files are now copied safely to my local laptop. Whether they will be shared again is something else entirely. But, phew and huzzuh! Time to order me some books!

Oh no!! This might have been how I looked when I found my file had disappeared

The rest of the day was spent helping my helpers. Yes, I had helpers today. Four of them! Woo hoo! And they got a lot done. Three of them worked on painting the back stairs together and I think everything is done except for the steps and the wall and the ceiling – all of which will go faster with rollers – which I have on my list to purchase. Meanwhile, another helper and I, mostly the helper, did some work in the basement. He sorted the pile of wood that fell into “keep” and “let go” – and let go of about half of it which is probably right. I’ll get him to clean up that pile next week I think. And he started cleaning the work bench which had accumulated a whole lot of crap in the past few years. All in all, money well spent on work that definitely needed doing. And I didn’t have to do too much! Woo hoo!

We shall see how many come back next week.

Now it is dinner time. I have thawed pizza dough and wings. And I guess I will make a salad too, since I have more romaine lettuce now.

Augustus for President: I downloaded LibreOffice because it has a database option. From the little I have done, it doesn’t seem to work in a very wysiwyg sort of way. I stumbled through a bit of creation of the database I want to create. But then I got stuck. Luckily, google and you tube came through again. Google and it’s AI did a good job of giving me an overview. Then I started watching a video on the basics. I’ll keep watching that tomorrow.

I gave out a few stickers to the helpers. And admonished them to take the surveys on my campaign website. We shall see if any of them do it.